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The knowledge that he cannot control the bond makes him a special kind of furious, helpless and a little desperate.
Supreme Leader Snoke had found the bond, holding it between invisible fingers and dangling it, tangling it in fascination. “She is a strange creature, is she not, Kylo Ren?” Snoke had murmured, entranced with the fledgling bond as well as the scavenger it was attached to. “Such an appetite.” He’d laughed. “I have not known of such a bottomless pit since Nihilus.” The ancient, giant face had moved to create a small, twisted smile. “Does it bode ill for the Resistance, I wonder, how curious.”
Snoke had thankfully allowed Kylo Ren’s failures to move over him like water over a fish, far too preoccupied with the alien appearance of the bond that Kylo Ren had inadvertently begun not so long ago in the interrogation room. Only after careful browbeating, and a graceful hand gesture that had sent Kylo Ren screaming to his knees; ice cracking over his spine and turning him inside out, Snoke had ended their discussion with: “Guard yourself, my apprentice. That one does not grasp moderation .”
It is not her wildness, the animal way she eats or jealously guards things she views as hers, that Kylo Ren finds in the least disturbing. That facet of her nature is encouraging, she could be made to turn, that she may welcome it. He, in his moments alone and far from Snoke’s presence, acknowledges that she would make a good apprentice; she is too untrained and his uncle is far too soft to handle her. She would make a better sith than a jedi.
But her loneliness, her anger and possessiveness, even her occasional brute callousness do not affect him so much as that image he’d uncovered in her mind.
Endless dark caves without water or food, ones that seemed to have no end, that lay beneath the ocean depths of her lonely island, so far removed that it could have been someone else’s mind but no - it had been hers.
Kylo cannot say, has never been able to say, that he could withhold his curiosity about untold mysteries. He had approached it, inquisitive as to where they would lead in her psyche and the deep dark that lay falsely dormant beneath her little island and ocean had reacted in a way he never would have thought possible. She’d turned on him - swallowed the connection he had created by invading her, and gone through his mind in such a way that it had left no doubt in him that she was a scavenger; pulling on important pieces of himself - Darth Vader, his fear, his anger, once a traitor, and discarding anything she’d felt was of no use to her.
There were no shadows in the girl known as Rey; there were only pits without an end. Her loneliness had been great, a possible starting point Kylo could have preyed upon, but the craving was another matter.
Her appetite, from across his end of the bond, seemed to find nothing that could slake it. Her loneliness had only been a piece of it. Her hunger was all encompassing, and stretched across various definitions.
She had nearly swallowed him whole once, a whale to his eel, uncaring that he had panicked in her grasp - were she a jedi at the time, she would have released him, not trapped them both by reaffirming, solidifying the bond and carelessly digging into his mind and all that it offered unwillingly - and even across the stretch of galaxy that separated them he could feel her.
Not in the sense he could sense his master, a form of a being, but the intangible feeling of a mouth breathing; hot and unseen panting with teeth pressing against him, against the bond, against everyone she came in to contact with, everything she did.
Once, when he’d been flying with Han Solo, they had come across a bazaar on a world that had been filled with dangerous, exotic creatures for sale. Most of the animals were still wild and willful; they bucked and howled, snapped their teeth at the cages and their tethers and their captors.
He imagines sometimes that he can feel her, gnawing and tearing on the bond like an unwanted tether, even as she tugs it to feel his presence - it is a disconcerting feeling to know that she is actively searching for him like a hand blindly grasping for another in the dark. There doesn’t seem to be any sense of attraction on her part, but her loneliness makes her willingly blind and the hunger that focuses on everything and anything drives her.
Feeding off of his presence, the way he has felt her do to his uncle in the past, and it seems to matter very little to her that he is her enemy.
To say he dislikes the idea of her feeding off of him, to liken him to an animal of prey, is a vast understatement that borders on ridiculous.
It does not make it untrue.
And that singular fact is what forces Kylo Ren to withdraw from her as often as possible - he feels for her when she is otherwise occupied or in the company of others so her attention - as terribly, intelligently, single-mindedly focused as a krayt dragon - is not drawn to him.
She is intriguing. As intriguing to him as the wildlife explorers find the open, hostile wilderness.
But his barriers and mental shields will only do so much. What she lacks in experience she makes up for in desperate cleverness and brute force.
Nonetheless, Kylo Ren is keen to keep her out whenever possible.
As he reads about the old jedi civil war and the split between Revan and Malak in the archives, he feels a yank behind his navel - a new thing that is undoubtedly connected to the scavenger.
He feels her searchinglookingfeeling blindly for him and he throws up mental barriers to keep her out, to keep the sniffing, prowling creature from him even as she seems to unthinking claw and paw at the gates that remain shut to her.
She subsides some, distracted by something or someone else after long minutes of Kylo Ren actively trying to ignore her invasive intrusion.
Even still, he can feel teeth chewing at the bond, rending it just enough to not break it, not weaken it, and the impression of jaws, that Kylo tells himself is only his imagination, opening ever wider stays with him throughout the day.